A Thought on Gemstore Skins: Where are the necromancer minion skins?

[Sigela.6352]

I would like a way for my minions and my jade mech to be visually customizable.

I'm slowly going to minionless necro builds because of this issue (along with the troublesome resummons).

Since I'm required by the game to monitor the mech's location closely in order to maintain the Mechanical Genius trait synergy with mech skill recharge, it's very troublesome when I lose track of him in crowds where there are several other jade mechs. (Modnir, Dragonstorm, Leyline Anomaly, Tequatl--just to name a few events where the crowd does me in.) Even just something as simple as being able to have an option on the same page where I can name the jade mech him that allows me to use one of the 21 starter standard colors as the core color would be a step towards making management more doable.

[Zebulous.2934]

There must be something difficult about making skins for temporary summons. Eso made one, just one, and decided never again. 

Some kind of a warden, it had a brown bear pet, the skin was a grey bear.  

Could anyone list a few mmos that do have alternate skins for summons and or spell effects? Oh and are those mmos third person or some other perspective?

 

[Donari.5237]

44 minutes ago, Zebulous.2934 said:

There must be something difficult about making skins for temporary summons. Eso made one, just one, and decided never again. 

Some kind of a warden, it had a brown bear pet, the skin was a grey bear.  

Could anyone list a few mmos that do have alternate skins for summons and or spell effects? Oh and are those mmos third person or some other perspective?

 

Well, GW2 has a jade bot mini that looks like however you've skinned the bot ... 😉 But of course that may just mean they've made multiple minis and just display the one you select in the jade bot panel.  Still, that does seem like a step towards customizing other summons.

[Danikat.8537]

10 hours ago, Zebulous.2934 said:

There must be something difficult about making skins for temporary summons. Eso made one, just one, and decided never again. 

Some kind of a warden, it had a brown bear pet, the skin was a grey bear.  

Could anyone list a few mmos that do have alternate skins for summons and or spell effects? Oh and are those mmos third person or some other perspective?

Ironically ESO does. They've recently started selling alternate animations for gathering (kind of like GW2's infinite gathering tools, except in ESO it never required a consumable item), for teleporting and a few other things. Also mount skins obviously, which are a kind of summon or effect I think. It's not optional but they've also changed the animations for some skills over time, like changing which spear model is used for templar jabs. They also sell 'personalities' which change the animations your character uses for walking, running, jumping and some emotes.

I've never understood why they made the 1 skin for the warden bear and then nothing else. Even if they stuck to different kinds of bear it'd be popular (a polar bear to go with the warden's ice magic is an obvious choice) but if they sold other animals as well it'd be a big hit, and they wouldn't even need to design new models, they could use existing ones like wolves or lions.

Admittedly I don't know what's actually involved in changing skill effects or summons, but I do know it's happened before in GW2 as well - sometimes when they change how a skill functions they also change the animation to match the new function, and at some point they also added swimming animations to the necromancer's flesh golem. So it is possible to change them. What may not be possible is players selecting which version they want to use, but they've added that option for other things so I assume it would be possible to build it.

[Kiki.9450]

13 hours ago, Zebulous.2934 said:

There must be something difficult about making skins for temporary summons. Eso made one, just one, and decided never again. 

Some kind of a warden, it had a brown bear pet, the skin was a grey bear.  

Could anyone list a few mmos that do have alternate skins for summons and or spell effects? Oh and are those mmos third person or some other perspective?

 

I only play one other MMO, so I can only list one. WoW has just recently released some new skins for some of the temporarily summoned demons that warlocks can bring in (demonology's Tyrant and affliction's Darkglare, which both only last for however long before despawning). Additionally, hunters have, for a while, been able to use Dire Beast to summon a random creature. I want to say since BfA(?) the spell has been "customised" so that the creatures summoned are based on the surrounding areas. In a forest? Maybe it summons a bear or wolf. In a plains area? Maybe it summons a lion or hyena, etc. This spell can be player-customised to summon only specific creatures too, like if you really just want it to summon spiders all the time.

 

All in all though, different games will have different reasons for having "technical issues" to overcome. It could be as simple as "the guy who originally wrote this didn't document it well and is no longer working with us and we don't have the available resources to go in and reverse-engineer it now" or "we still need to figure out where to implement it, i.e. UI."

[Gendalfs.7521]

2 hours ago, Kiki.9450 said:

It could be as simple as "the guy who originally wrote this didn't document it well and is no longer working with us and we don't have the available resources to go in and reverse-engineer it now"

You need really high qualified tech guy to do this and those guys cost money.

[Lucy.3728]

I like that idea.

Although it won't make me play minion necro more often since it is just something visual. Depending how it looks (I'm not for cute, I rather like creepy for the undead - undead Choya army :3) and costs I'd buy skins nonetheless.
Seeing how many jackal skins I bought just because they were so cool (fox skin pack 🥰) but I rarely use the jackal... says enough. 😞
One of my MM is a little 'sacred but humble' themed, so maybe some themed minions to that. I'd buy it just to complete the theme xD https://i.postimg.cc/PJqs1SLT/gw303.jpg

And I'd love other mech skins. I don't even like that sickly green color.
I'd rather have one looking like the Jet Alone from the NGE anime. https://www.google.com/search?q=Jet+Alone

Edited January 20 by Lucy.3728

[Eloc Freidon.5692]

I would love pet skins available somehow. Tired of green mech.

On 1/18/2024 at 6:14 PM, Zebulous.2934 said:

There must be something difficult about making skins for temporary summons. Eso made one, just one, and decided never again. 

Some kind of a warden, it had a brown bear pet, the skin was a grey bear.  

Could anyone list a few mmos that do have alternate skins for summons and or spell effects? Oh and are those mmos third person or some other perspective?

 

Champions Online pets have a drop down option that change how your wolves, golems, healing drones, and various other pets appear. A game that came out in 2009. I can't imagine what customization looks like in City of Heroes.

[Firefly.5982]

As long as you only want this implemented in PvE, sure. Because in PvP and WvW it's actually important to be able to tell what runs around with a player xD

[Kiki.9450]

47 minutes ago, Firefly.5982 said:

As long as you only want this implemented in PvE, sure. Because in PvP and WvW it's actually important to be able to tell what runs around with a player xD

Client-side options to disable this sort of thing should help. Option enabled = other people's funky custom buddies look like funky custom buddies. Option disabled = other people's funky custom buddies look like standard generic buddies. Could even disable it by default for competitive.

Client-side, your own customisations would always be visible to you if you have them on.